Showing posts in Best Practices
Seven claims that circulate in rescue appeals and volunteer chats, each audited against published data. Five are false, two depend on what you count. Inflated numbers cost a rescue credibility it needs, the honest figures still make the case, and the evidence says to stop treating the adoption fee as a screening tool.
MedicalBetween now and mid-December, fewer than one female cat in thirty arriving at a TNR clinic is pregnant, compared with a third to over half in March and April. Groups that wind trapping down for winter are giving up their most productive surgery window. Trap through it, hold cats longer instead of stopping, drop the December gift-adoption ban, and rewrite the year-end appeal around a tax change most small donors have not heard of.
DogsThe October pause on black cat adoptions guards against an adopter nobody has documented, and it costs the slowest-moving cats in the building a month at the worst time of year. The usual rebuttal overstates black cat bias too. Drop the pause, drop the Halloween discount, and spend the effort on the photographs.
General"Most foster agreements spend three pages on feeding and leash rules and one sentence on who owns the animal. That is the wrong ratio. Here is a ten-clause agreement you can copy, and the argument for why the care rules should be taken out of it entirely."
DogsThe IRS sample conflict of interest policy defines the problem as a financial one, so the copy in your binder does nothing about the conflicts that damage rescues — who gets first refusal on the adoptable dog, whose friend gets the fee waived, which household the good foster animals go to. A nine-article policy that covers those, plus the argument that a bylaw banning insider payment governs it worse than permitting it under conditions.
GeneralRefusing to name a euthanasia threshold is not a policy against euthanasia — it is a decision to decide later, under pressure, by whoever is in the room. Three separate questions hide inside the word, and the third one, opportunity cost, is the one most rescues will not admit is a question at all.
MedicalCosted at replacement value, volunteer labour is about two-thirds of what a trapping night costs and the clinic donation is about a quarter. A group that is already turning down surgery slots because nobody can trap should spend its next marginal dollar paying a trapper, not buying more vouchers.
DogsPublished return rates for adopted dogs and cats run from 7% to 20%, but the figure your organization reports depends mostly on where you draw the cut-off. The published studies disagree about when returns happen, and that disagreement is the useful part.
MedicalThe 80% number is real, but it is a rate you have to keep paying, not a milestone you reach and bank. Most scattered, colony-by-colony TNR is a welfare intervention being sold as a population intervention, and the vacuum effect argument rescues use against catch-and-kill applies just as squarely to their own successes.
Colony & TNRDaily feeding is the closest thing you have to daily surveillance of your colony. If you're not recording it, you're throwing away the most useful data you'll ever collect.
GeneralYou said yes to fostering. Now you've got cats on different medications, a kitten litter that needs weighing, and information scattered across five places. Here's how to stay on top of it.
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